


These Violet Hours

by Muccamukk



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Farmhouse of Love, Figurative Language, M/M, Natural Disasters, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25500877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Lew had the topography of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, in his mind's eye the same as he knew the contours of those shoulders. He could see rivulets starting in the Blue Ridge Mountains fuelled by too-fast melting snow, each one joining like strands of a rope, all pouring down towards the sea. It was just too bad their farm was in the way.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52
Collections: Picture_Prompt_Fun, Sunshine Challenge





	These Violet Hours

**Author's Note:**

> For Picture Prompt Fun [Prompt #135](https://picture-prompt-fun.dreamwidth.org/113373.html), and for Sunshine Challenge Prompt #7: Violet.
> 
> Not in continuity with any of my other fic. There was no catastrophic flood in eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1940s.
> 
> Thank you to ThrillingDetectiveTales for beta reading.

At about two in the morning, the night after the rain started, Dick went down to the bottom field and got the tractor. Lew went with him, lighting the way down and opening gates, pushing when required. By the time they got the clanking machine up to the field above the house, they were both soaked through and covered in mud, and the power had gone out.

"Probably the whole county," Dick muttered, shading his eyes and looking downslope as though he could have seen the lights of the neighbours through this rain. The light of Lew's flashlight licked at the sodden fabric of his shirt, showing a rumpled contour of a soldier's shoulders turned to a farmer's work. His hair was plastered to his face like he was a drowned kitten.

Lew had the topography of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, in his mind's eye the same as he knew the contours of those shoulders. He could see rivulets starting in the Blue Ridge Mountains fuelled by too-fast melting snow, each one joining like strands of a rope, all pouring down towards the sea. It was just too bad their farm was in the way.

The creek that marked the property boundary had already swollen to five times the size it had been when they'd bought the place in September. "We're going to lose the beets," Lew said, pointlessly.

Dick didn't answer; he turned and went back down hill and started pulling things out of the sheds. Lew went with him.

The water rose all night, and the morning following. They rolled up the rugs and moved them into the attic along with boxes of books and any furniture that would fit up the steep ladder and through the narrow hatch.

The water had turned into a creeping thing by then, no longer anything like the mountain freshets. Lew knew that it was a matter of gravity, of water pouring in from the whole state, but in the transmogrified world, it seemed as though some magic in the rain was making water rise up from the earth to surround them. Maybe it was more like chemistry. That, at least, Lew understood.

Dick planted a row of sticks in the backyard, and Lew counted them off as they vanished into the great brown lake that had been the valley bottom. It had been two months’ work that spring. It had been a GI Bill loan to get them started.

Lew could see Dick counting the cost. His gaze scanned relentlessly over the property, and Lew knew that his eyes didn't see each fence line or each tree but only rising debt.

Around noon, they opened a couple cans of beans, and ate them out of the tins with spoons. It felt wrong to just sit at the kitchen table eating the civilian world's answer to k-rations, like Colonel Sink in the centre of besieged Bastogne.

Lew opened his mouth and thought about mentioning farm relief, or insurance or some other contingency, but ended up jamming another spoonful of stickily sweet beans in his mouth and following Dick's example of shutting up. He could hear the rain lashing against the windows and the rush of water past the trees, but nothing else.

A devastation, Lew thought, should sound like an artillery barrage, or a troop transport bursting into fire around him, not the stillness of encroaching water. The end of the world should come with fanfare, trumpets and the heavens rending, not cold beans and silent despair.

"Maybe we should leave," Lew said. All the sticks were gone, and he could hear water rushing into a root cellar already emptied of sprouting potatoes and bright jars of pickles and preserves. "If the house goes—"

Dick shook his head. "It won't," he said, but Lew knew he had no evidence for it. The house was too newly theirs to trust in its surety yet.

_If you want to go, you can,_ Dick's eyes said.

It'd been a year now, and Dick was looking at him like that every time their lives closed in on them: when the pipes had frozen that winter, when they'd worked for days in the mud to get the first tilling done, when they'd gotten that letter from Lew's mother laying out his choices. Every soul-grinding day, Dick had looked at Lew as if he were the last swallow of summer, as if Lew's migration back towards the sun were only a matter of time. Dick, at least, never asked aloud, and Lew never left.

"Let's get some sleep," Lew said, and started to strip out of his mud-streaked overalls.

"What, now?" Dick asked, but he was already following Lew into a bedroom stripped of valuables. "What if the house..." He'd run into his own logic, there, and stopped.

Lew crawled naked into the bed and pulled the quilts up over himself. "If the house goes, we'll just stay in bed until we float down to Philly," Lew said from under the covers. "Ol' Guarnere will rescue us."

"Or we'll be the last two men on Earth," Dick said.

"Like Noah's ark?"

"Maybe."

Something about that made Dick laugh, and not kindly, but got in bed beside Lew all the same.

His skin was clammy from the damp, and they were getting the sheets muddy, and Lew didn't care. All he cared about was the way Dick's knees slotted into the backs of Lew's, and the familiar feel of Dick's hand spread wide over Lew's heart. Dick still dropped to sleep like a soldier, breath steadying in moments.

Lew lay awake a little, listening to the rush of water. The rain had eased, at last, but jolts kept rocking through the house as a winter's worth of flotsam washed and bumped against it.

They woke hours later, the main floor still dry and the rain ended.

Still naked, they climbed up to the attic to kneel shoulder to shoulder at the gable window, watching the sunset over the ocean they'd called their home. If it weren't for the row of half-drowned trees along the property line and the shape of the hills in the distance, Lew would have thought that the house had been swept away, like Dorothy lifted to Oz. The sunset caught in water and cloud alike, turning the world into an impressionist's dream of swirled, distorted purple and pink. The stark branches of the trees marked the only solidity between the window frame and the misted hills. Debris floated by, but the growing dusk muted their forms, blackness on dark water.

"I think it's going down," Lew said, though the only evidence he had was the lapping of water at the bottom step of the back porch, rather than the second step.

"We'll see," Dick answered. He stared out over the now still waters of the flood, and Lew turned to watch the last light of evening reflected on his face. It was beautiful.

Tomorrow, Lew knew, the water would go down. Tomorrow, they'd start picking up the pieces and working out the hundred thousand details of what to do next. Tomorrow, they would recommence the limitless work of transforming death into life, a farmer's work.

Now, Lew watched Dick watch the sunset, and knew that he would never leave.


End file.
